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    Paint Ejection

    Shaking paint on a speaker cone and filming it in high speed is an oldie but a goodie. Here, artist Linden Gledhill films paint ejection at 10,000 frames per second, giving us a glorious view of the process. As the paint flies upward, accelerated by the speaker, it stretches into long ligaments. As the ligaments thin, surface tension concentrates the paint into droplets, connected together by thinning strands. When those strands break, they snap back toward the remaining paint, imprinting swirling threads of different colors, thanks to their momentum. Eventually, surface tension wins the tug-of-war and transforms all the paint into droplets. (Video and image credit: L. Gledhill)

  • Flamingo Fluid Dynamics

    Flamingo Fluid Dynamics

    Flamingos strut and dance and bob, but there’s more to these comical birds than meets the eye. Flamingos can thrive in nutrient-poor environments that other birds eschew, like salt flats and alkaline lakes. Their secret, it turns out, is a mastery of fluid dynamics.

    Researchers studying the behaviors of the Nashville Zoo’s flamingo flock discovered that their seemingly silly behaviors all had fluid dynamical consequences. When the birds stomped and danced in small circles, it stirred up the muck in the water they eat from. With their beaks below the surface, the birds then opened and closed their mouths, darting their tongues in and out; this generated suction to carry food particles toward them. Periodically, they’d bob their heads up, creating a vortex for extra suction. Even their walking, which they did while skimming the water surface with their bills facing backward, generated flows that helped carry food to their mouths. (Image credit: cshong; research credit: V. Ortega-Jiménez et al.; via Science; submitted by Kam-Yung Soh)

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    “Turbulence”

    In his recent short film, artist Roman De Giuli explores turbulence using metallic paints and inks in a fishtank. The effects are beautiful: sparkling pigments dispersing in clouds, mushroom- and umbrella-shaped Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities, and lots of swirling eddies. It’s exactly the kind of eyecandy to kick off your weekend with! (Image and video credit: R. De Giuli)

  • Mixing in a Winter Lake

    Mixing in a Winter Lake

    A frozen winter lake can hide surprisingly complex flows beneath its placid surface. Since water is densest at 4 degrees Celsius — just above the freezing point — mixing two water sources can lead to counterintuitive effects. A cold lake, for example, may contain water below 4 degrees Celsius, while a stream running into the lake is a bit warmer than 4 degrees Celsius. When the two parcels of water meet, they mix to form water at an intermediate temperature. But because of water’s density anomaly, that mixed water can wind up denser than the average of its parents. This is known as cabbeling.

    Mixing patterns within a cold lake with a slightly warmer inflow. Image from A. Grace et al.
    Mixing patterns within a cold lake with a slightly warmer inflow. Image from A. Grace et al.

    As shown in a recent study, this newly mixed water sinks to the bottom of the lake, forming a warm current that heats the lake from below. The researchers were able to model this current and its behavior over a range of conditions. Understanding these winter circulation patterns is key to tracking both nutrient transport and how pollutants spread in the ecosystem. (Image credit: lake – G. Murry, simulation – A. Grace et al.; research credit: A. Grace et al.; via APS Physics)

  • Rippling Airglow

    Rippling Airglow

    Though we rarely notice it, our sky is always aglow. Washed in solar radiation, the oxygen and nitrogen molecules at high altitude get broken apart during the daytime and recombine at night, producing a luminescent glow that forms a uniform backdrop against the sky. In this image, the airglow forms a bull’s-eye-like set of rings, thanks to atmospheric gravity waves left behind by a thunderstorm. (Image credit: J. Dai; via APOD)

  • Chilly Soap Films

    Chilly Soap Films

    Evaporation is a well-known effect in soap films and bubbles. It’s responsible for the ever-changing thickness reflected in the film’s many colors. But evaporation does more than change the bubble’s thickness: it affects its temperature, too. Just as sweat evaporating off our skin cools us, the soap film’s evaporation makes it cooler than the surrounding air.

    Researchers found that their soap films could be as much as 8 degrees Celsius cooler than the surrounding air! They also found that the film’s glycerol content affect how much cooler the soap film is; films with more glycerol had higher temperatures, which could impact their overall stability. (Image credit: E. Škof; research credit: F. Boulogne et al.; via APS Physics)

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    Hollow Drops

    When a partially-air-filled drop hits a surface, it splashes and rebounds in a complex fashion. This video breaks down the physics of the process. Upon impact, a lamella spreads, eventually becoming wavy and unstable along its rim. At the same time, a counterjet forms, growing until it pierces the remaining bubble of the drop. The jet continues to stretch upward due to its momentum, pinching off and forming wobbly satellite drops that finally fall back to the surface. (Image and video credit: D. Naidu and S. Dash)

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    “aBiogenesis”

    Many theories posit the physical and chemical origins of life. In the short film “aBiogenesis”, CGI artist Markos Kay imagines one such theory — the lipid world theory — in which cellular life began as a soup contained within immiscible fatty membranes. Chemicals trapped within these vesicles interacted and ultimately formed the building blocks of life as we know it, including RNA. Kay’s interpretation is a beautiful exploration of this intersection of physics, chemistry, and biology. (Image and video credit: M. Kay; via Colossal)

  • Where Fresh and Salty Meet

    Where Fresh and Salty Meet

    Waterways twist through the wetlands of Adair Bay in this astronaut-captured image of northwestern Mexico. The estuary marks the transition between the Great Altar Desert and the Gulf of California. Fresh and salt water mix in the sediment-rich waterways. Mangroves and other salt-tolerant vegetation flourish in the coastal marsh. During low tides, evaporating water leaves behind salt flats, seen here in gray and white. High tides flood the area with nutrients that support both the vegetation and abundant aquatic life. (Image credit: NASA; via NASA Earth Observatory)

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    Kelvin-Helmholtz Flows Downhill

    Gravity currents carry denser fluids into lighter ones, like cold air drifting under your door in winter or dense fogs flowing downhill in San Francisco. Here, researchers visualize the situation using denser salt water flowing into fresh water. Once the gate separating the two fluids rises, the salt water slides down an artificial slope into the fresh water.

    Very quickly the flow forms a Kelvin-Helmholtz instability due to the different flow speeds between the two fluids. Kelvin-Helmholtz waves form distinctive swirls and billows that are reminiscent of a cat’s eye. As the swirls rotate, they can flow over one another, and break up into turbulence. (Image and video credit: C. Troy and J. Koseff)

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